"Rogue Primate: An exploration of human domestication " By John Livingston

“. . . The human animal of any society and at any time was and is the creature of how-to-do-it. That is the most fundamental characteristic of humanness.” Chapter 2 pg 14.

The human as a domesticated animal
“Human domestication is, nearly enough, a synonym for civilization. It is the quality of domesticatedness that has allowed us not only to be what we are but to accomplish what we have on Earth in the course of our relatively brief tenure as a species. . . . Among domesticated animals we are unique. All domesticated animals that are not human are our artifacts. . . We, on the other hand, are evolved domesticates, the products of our own biological and cultural history. . .”Chapter 2 pg 13-14.

Characteristics of domesticated animals:
1. dependence – on human owners, or in the case of the human domesticate on technology/how-to-do-it (usually derived from co-operative social structures) often to the point of the destruction of individual will/mind
2. individual bonds are to other individuals rather than to place (usually – exception is the dog)
3. reduction/eradication of the natural aversion to crowding
4. docility and tractability
5. most ancestors of domesticates were large, lived in open or montane habitats, and were non-selective feeders
6. decreased social interaction/communication within and between species
7. hoofed domesticates especially show high tolerance for discomfort (or can’t communicate it)
8. acceptance of homogeneity in its environment
9. fecundity (no breeding season, many offspring)
10. fast physical(size) and sexual maturation
11. social maturation is slow or absent (adults even look like young members of non-domesticated relatives)
12. decreased sensory acuity
13. may be great variability in appearance but behavioural variability is low

“. . . In theory at least, we all retain the capacity for wildness. In practice, we cling limpet-like to the ideology of dualism, we deny the virtue of wildness, and we deny its accessibility to us.” Ch 6 p. 118

“… although domesticates grow very rapidly, they never really grow up. That is exactly the way we want it. . . . Where the domesticate has been genetically manipulated into that parlous condition, however, we have not. We are the creatures of our ideological prosthesis – the surrogate for wild wholeness that allows us to believe in our separation from and supremacy over Nature. Though the animal’s plight is genetic and ours is ideological, the net result is strikingly similar. The development of the young domesticate is arrested by the nature of its physical being; the development of the young human is arrested by cultural conditioning.” Ch. 7 p. 120.


Children and Nature

“for the pre-adolescent the experience of technology is substituted for the experience of nature.” Ch 7, p. 134

“The arresting effects of experiential undernutrition [lack of exposure to nature] on the development of children in urban-industrial society are made worse by the additional influence of chronic malnutrition [exposure to harmful experiences of nature/technology]. . . . Where the experientially undernourished child may be seen as a casualty of neglect and deprivation, the experientially malnourished child may be seen as the model achievement of the process of domestic technological fabrication. Most of our society’s children suffer from both. It would seem that while the effects of undernutrition can often be ameliorated through proper doses of appropriate dietary supplements, the work of chronic malnutrition is much more difficult to correct. . . “Ch 7 p. 134


The myth of “zero-order humanism”

“As the domesticates of technology, we have developed traditions and modes of behaviour, and ideas, that best serve our master.” Ch 8 p. 138

“As we moved more deeply into conditioned servitude to reason, rationalization, and technique, the role of experience in our lives inexorably diminished, ultimately to be subordinated almost entirely to reason. Our hyperspecialization was deftly rationalized from unprecedented domesticated dependence into unprecedented species chauvinism.” Ch. 8 p. 139

“The sacrosanctity of the human program is immune to challenge. It is zero-order. Critics of “sustainable development,” for example, are expected to be silenced by the ultimate trump card.” A trump card carries its own moral authority and, like any other absolute, requires on explication or justification. On the basis of already existing evidence, the destiny of Earth as human monoculture is manifest.” Ch. 8 p. 142

“Zero-order humanism, like all ideologies, is vulnerable to both ethical and logical analysis because its final bulwark consists of nothing more than its trump card. Remove the justifying moral authority of any manifest truth, and you have very little left. Remove the mythological “imaginative insulation” that surrounds a human society, reveal the world outside the cultural stockade, and – presto! – good things can follow. If the human enterprise can be shown not to enjoy primacy over all other things – and certainly not necessarily – then there could be positive consequences for all concerned. Perhaps even for the laboratory victims.” Ch 8 p. 149

“…most of those who would work to improve the lot of non-human Nature in the world customarily contain their arguments within the ground-rules of conventional human-centered discourse. Why not couch our case for Nature protection in terms of human interest? . . . It is not even so much the inadequacy of such within-the-system tinkering that disturbs one (if you are working within the system, you are part of the problem); it is much more that silence on (and, indeed, avoidance of) the “root” issues may be taken as tacit endorsement of the zero-order imperative.” Ch 10, p. 186

“…as biological beings, we still have access to our own nature. That is a statement arising from an ideology different from the prevailing version. It is one that allows us first to understand and then to reject zero-order humanism together with all of its arrogant, cruel, and unnatural appendages. It allows us to seek a structure of ideas and beliefs that will be built not on future (abstract) desires and expectation, but on past (experienced) qualities of active bonding and participation.” Ch 10, p. 196